Linda Thompson was 22, newly crowned Miss Tennessee, when she met Elvis Presley at a midnight film screening in Memphis in the summer of 1972. He was 37 and had just separated from Priscilla. They talked for hours that first night. The next day he invited her to Graceland to meet his father.
She stayed four and a half years.
The connection was immediate, and partly it was geography. They were both from Memphis: same humor, same references. There was even a genuine coincidence between them — Linda’s grandmother had lived in the same housing project where Elvis grew up as a small boy.
Within months she had moved in. She set about making Graceland feel lived-in rather than famous, adding stained glass, climbing roses, and peacocks to the grounds. She went to hundreds of his shows and learned his vocal warm-ups so she could help him prepare.
Linda Thompson on Elvis
But she also saw what the public did not. Behind the jumpsuits was a man who was exhausted and increasingly dependent on prescription medication. When he spent 18 days in hospital in 1973, she did not visit — she moved in, sleeping on a cot beside his bed, waking through the night to check he was still breathing.
Her line about it has never changed: “Whenever he went to the hospital, I went to the hospital.”
The hardest part was the other women. He told her she was the only one, but that wasn’t true. On one occasion in San Francisco, he put her on his private plane home while another woman waited at his hotel.
Elvis and Linda Thompson, the untold story
She reached her limit in 1976—and she didn’t say it out loud. She used a song. She played him “Fairy Tale,” a track about a relationship that was never what it pretended to be, and let the record do the talking. Then she moved out of Graceland.
Eight months later he was dead. The phone call that told her came from his nine-year-old daughter, Lisa Marie.
She is 76 now, and still says the same thing about him: he was her perfect match, and she loved him as a soul.